Best Mac Software

So while I'm a long time micro, mini, and mainframe user, I have only dabbled in Macs in the past and have only been a recent serious Mac user.

I know there is a sticky thread with some of this stuff, but I don't see software there that addresses a lot of the stuff I do (and presumably a lot of others do).

Attached is a list of the Windows and Mac Software I've chosen so far to take care of my most common daily tasks.

I'm looking for feedback from you experienced Mac users that could use my choices as a discussion point so all us new Mac users could learn if these were good or bad choices and what other alternatives might be out there that might be as good or better.

 

Sounds like a good idea for a new Guide thread. Someone should make one. I don't know a thing about the Macs (other than it has one button, so no right clicks...scary)

 

Yeah, with Mac sales up 30% last year I expect there are more than a few of us Mac newbies. I'm a business user so maybe this will help other potential business users gather food for thought.

 

I agree that more Mac guides can't hurt. I'm with guatam3 on this one. About the only thing I know about Macs are the lack of a right click, and the Command button. Foreign territory for me. I'm getting more and more curious though, and plan on getting an older mac just to dabble before long.

 

When I first got this MacBook I thought - WTF - Apple get with the program and put a two button freaking touch pad on this thing.

Then I found the setting for the touch pad that allows a right click (by touching the pad with two fingers instead of one). Its a little weird but works great and becomes second nature quickly.

So PLEASE, help Apple stomp out the "I can't right click on a Mac" myth. And Apple - if you are listening - please add that second button. ;-)

 

You say that all mac ftp clients suck... but yet you forgot to put any of the mac ftp clients on there...
such as cyberduck.
Non native video formats : VLC
There are also a lot better note taking programs than OmniOutliner. Not very useful for note taking unless you're doing it in outline form (which seldom is useful in my classes

Also you completely missed Adium as the chat program. It's a much better program than Trillian. MUCH better.

I've never used snapndragit, but you do know that OS X has built in screen capture that will even let you select a portion to capture right?

I'm not a big fan of StuffIT (use BOMarchiver) and Winzip sucks. Period. Winrar is a hell of a lot better. And .rars are very popular now. They also have support for parity files. Unfortunantly they have not made a GUI for the OS X version. UnRarX works with rar files though, and is pretty decent.

Concept Draw is pretty good as well as MagicDraw. I'm just glad you didn't mention Rational Developer (blegh). For programming, the best editor I've seen is the TextMate. Not free... but awesome.

I'd also have to pop in a note that OS X doesn't have any real dvd ripping utilities. While it has something that can rip the movie to a file (ie using handbrake) it does not have anything comparable to DVD Shrink. At least, not that I was able to find. So I still do all my dvd copying through windows still. :-/

I'll have to check out Dbvisualizer.

There is also openoffice as a free office app. I dunno if you have tried that, but it is also very popular (and the linux standard). Though I do prefer MS office for mac (I get MS products for almost free at my univ). It does actually run well, it just takes a bit to startup.

AASYNC, I haven't played with that yet. Are you actually syncing the files or just backing them up? As you say daily backup to remote server, I understand that being backup only. There are a few cheap (if not free) OS X backup utilies that let you back up to a remote server. Hell, you could also write a Automater script to ftp what you want backed up.

I haven't played with Cocktail yet, I'll also have to check that out. Unsanity.com has some good little apps. You might want to check out their Shapeshifter which is a hack that lets you mod the OS shell. I haven't done anything with it yet, but looks promising.

 

Yeah, I felt the same way. But now, I PREFER the single button over the 2 button thing. Not on a real mouse mind you, but on a laptop, it's MUCH nicer. I've actually never used a laptop where the buttons feel... good.

 

Thanks hollownail, thats the kind of useful info I was looking for.

The FTP clients I've tried include Cyberduck, Transmit, VicomSoft and a few others I don't remember and no longer have installed. None of them work with IBM AS400's, and none of them support several SSL base hosts I regularly use - ironic since the command line FTP in OS X seems to work with everything I tried.

I tried Adium, but it does not yet suppor video conferencing - simething I do a lot so I'm stuck with the actual YIM client and iChat for now.

SnapDragit just puts a pretty face on the built in OS X stuff and makes it easier to capture Windows and save them in a veriety of formats.

I don't Rip DVD's everyday but I do use Handbrake when I do and it works great.

NeoOffice is just a customized version of OpenOffice that works with Aqua and does not need X11

AASYNC allows me to Sync folders on my hard drive with a remote server. Its both for incremental backup and allows other folks access to my latest work products via a server thats always up (as my laptop moves around a lot and is online/offline a lot. SuperFlexibleFileServer allowed me to do this in near real time. AASYNC is way too slow and at best is once daily thing.

thanks!

 

Hrm, Cyberduck supports FTP-SSL and SFTP. I thought Trasmit did as well, but I don't have it installed to check again. But I don't have any knowledge of the AS400's, so I dunno.

Yup, adium doens't support video conference. YET! Hopefully they'll get the ball rolling on that.

OpenOffice should be having an Aqua version out soon. At least, thats the rumor. Not sure if it's true, but then again, I'm not a huge fan of any free Office apps.

Hrm, so real syncing, I would be curious to any other programs that do that. I'm not sure if Super duper has that ability or not. I believe it may, but I don't have the full version.

 

Oh all three of the clients I bought SAY they support it, and I assume with some Mac Hosts they actually work, but on several Unix and Windows based hosts I've tried the FTP-SSL on it actually does not seem to work where various Windows clients I have do work. Vicomsoft actually claims to work with AS400 too and has the options in its config but does not work, then when you talk to them they say "oh, that used to work on our old PPC version but not on the Universal and we don't plan to support it anymore".

I have the full version of SuperDuper but it requires a mounted device and does not sync to an FTP server. I may try and set up VPN access to my server so I could actually mount it and use SuperDuper - but to be honest SuperDuper seems pretty slow as well in figuring out whats changed and what needs updating (usually about 20 minutes to backup what changes on my Macbook in a week and I don't usually change THAT much).

 

Hrm, that sucks about none of the software supporting SSL with the AS400. I should try seeing if I can get SSL to work between my mac and my linux server sometime.

Yar, that sucks SuperDuper doesn't support syncing to ftp serers. I wonder if there is another program that can do that. The more I use a mac, the more I see opprotunities to write some software to do some seemingly basic stuff.

I've never used a sync program though, how fast is one on windows compared to the one you use on mac (of course, basing measurements on roughly the same amount of synced data)?

 

There seems to be almost an order of magnitude difference between SuperFlexableFileSync and anything I've found for the Mac. Like what would take a couple of minutes using SFFS, would take 10 minutes on the Mac

I see two reasons - SFFS is smart enough to compress stuff it sends (and a service you leave running on the other end seamlessly uncompresses it) which saves some transmit time. The bigger reason is SFFS uses dates/times to determine if and in which direction to sync something and I think the MAc stuff is going through journals or whole files and doing checksums which is more accurate but a LOT more time consuming.